Nothing can bring down a company faster than a broken culture. There’s no amount of advertising that can fix a company that’s damaged from the inside.

The culture you create should instruct the advertising you do, and your advertising should mirror the culture in your company. This ensures your customers will experience the same thing you’ve told them in your advertising.

 

Wizard of Ads partner Mike Slover joins this episode of The Wizard’s Roundtable with Mike Whitmire from Schneider’s One Hour Heat & Air

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Johnny Molson: You’ve been enjoying the Wizard’s Roundtable, but you don’t have time to sit in front of YouTube and watch the Wizard’s Roundtable. The Wizard’s Roundtable is now a podcast. Wherever it is you get your podcasts, you can now find the audio from the Wizard’s Roundtables. So you can listen to this on your commute or while you’re exercising or whatever it is you do when you listen to podcasts.

On today’s episode, one of the themes that you hear often here is that marketing and advertising aren’t the same thing. Marketing is so much wider than just the front facing advertising that a business does. And one of the things that comes under the umbrella of marketing is the culture within your company. How you interact with your employees equates to how your employees interact with your customers. It’s all connected. And it has to match up with the advertising that the customers hear.

To help us talk about that today is Mike Slover, Wizard of Ads Partner, who is going to discuss how he helped a business improve the culture, and that has improved their marketing. The business he helped is Schneider’s One Hour Heating & Air in Butler, Pennsylvania. And Mike Whitmire is the head guy there. He’s going to talk about how this helped his business grow. So to start, let’s begin at the beginning with Mike Whitmire telling us what he saw that felt like it was kind of broken within the company and how that was having an impact on the results the company was having.

Mike Whitmire: Well, we didn’t notice any like team play or team spirit. Everybody watched for themselves. It was a lot of grumbling. “What do you mean I’ve got another call today?” Those kinds of things. And it led to a loss of people. I mean, there was great turnover. The other thing that kind of led to that was we had a really great team about five – six years ago, experienced technicians… That polar vortex came through. I think we overworked them. So we had to, you know, learn to adapt to a creative work schedule and help those folks out so they got some home time too.

Johnny Molson: Mike Slover, as his consultant, what did you see and how did you help their team come together?

Mike Slover: Whenever I had went out there to meet with Mike and Gary in our discovery we noted the fact that they had this polar vortex and they kept referring to the guys as the 10-year guys. And he said, “Man, when we had our 10-year guys, those were our best years. And we had our most sales.” And their advertisement was actually really good, you know, and I knew that there was a couple little things I could do with their advertising. But it was that part that was going to get the biggest jump, if we could fix the internal culture. And look, in the service category, especially HVAC, there’s a high turnover ratio across the board. It just happens, you know, it’s kind of a revolving door. But we wanted to try to put a cap on that as much as we could. But we kept coming back and I kept hearing Mike and Gary say the word 10-year guys. “We had our 10-year guys… our 10-year guys…” It never left the conversation.

So I realized that was the key piece that we needed to work on. So that’s when we started to try to develop and groom and get more of those 10-year guys back per se. You know, not get them back after they left, but build them intentionally within the walls of Schneider’s One Hour Heating & Air.

Johnny Molson: So Mike Whitmire, you decided that it made sense to make sure that you had happy employees who were going to stay longer and that was ultimately going to help your business. What did you and Mike Slover do to start working on this?

Mike Whitmire: We tried to create some commonality with everybody. You know, I was talking to Mike, he and I have the baseball thing in common. We both have our teams, we cheer for–

Mike Slover: Oh Mike, hold on. [Puts on baseball cap]

Mike Whitmire: Oh yeah.

Mike Slover: I don’t know if it’ll fit over my headphones. Hang on a second. There we go.

Mike Whitmire: Okay. [Smiling] Yeah. Well, you know I kind of just started thinking back and kind of related to how I enjoyed coaching kid’s baseball. Kid sports in general, but baseball came a little bit easier to me. My son was an athlete coming up through… My daughter is in softball. Didn’t always have maybe the best rec team in the area. But we always played competitive because I was able to make the game fun for the guys and the gals. And that’s what I tried to emulate here at the shop is, “Hey let’s have a little bit of fun.” I’ve changed my terminologies to where we’re counting runs and swinging and missing and those kinds of phrases. And not everybody here is as big of a baseball fan as I am, but they’ve kinda caught on to the meanings and the way I’ve been talking.

Johnny Molson: Is that what you mean when you say you were looking for some commonality?

Mike Whitmire: Yeah, yeah. Try to get something we can all talk about and understand easier versus just, you know, talking numbers or missed opportunities or different things that happen throughout the business day. One stat that we used to keep in baseball for our pony league — so it’d be the 13 to 15 year olds — was we count how many bases we gave up because we bobbled the ball. So with my management team, we talked about not where we failed, but where we gave up an extra bag and how we could prevent guys getting extra bases on us.

Johnny Molson: So how do you translate getting the extra base to what you do in the heating and air industry? Is it just a missed opportunity?

Mike Whitmire: It could be a missed opportunity. It could be a little bit of a fumble because maybe someone didn’t perform their job quite right. And the outcome was, we had a recall out to the home that straightened it up afterwards. So yeah, that would be giving up bag. But you know, a couple weeks after I started talking that way, my service manager he went to the plate with a lady that really wasn’t happy with our service that one of his team members gave. He went out and instead of having some bad press — and those kinds of things happen — she ended up purchasing a system from us. And he came out into the shop where I was helping some other guys and he goes, “Hey boss, I just hit a home run.”

Johnny Molson: Wow, that’s great. And you know what I like so much about that is everyone from sports teams to the blue angels, sit down and review the film and say, all right, let’s look at this and figure out how we can avoid that the next time. And that sounds like exactly what you’re doing. And instead of saying “Hey, you really blew that one. Do better.” Next time you looked at that and said, “All right, here’s how we could have done this and recovered it.” So I think that’s really commendable.

Mike Whitmire: Yeah. Why don’t we try to take a negative and turn it into a positive somehow. And sometimes after all of that when the day is done, all you have is a positive training experience. And that’s the way it needs to be left, not a butt-kicking session out in the middle of the field somewhere. So just try to respect everybody and, you know, teach along the way.

Johnny Molson: Mike Slover, you believe and I believe that the culture and how people are being trained in the business is in fact part of marketing. What were your feelings when you saw it maybe as broken, and then saw it come together? How did that help the marketing?

Mike Slover: When you have the internal engine working how it’s supposed to, everything else seems to fall into place. One of the things that we did early on when we decided to build culture with intention at Schneider’s is we looked at our beliefs and our values at Schneider’s One Hour Heating & Air. I said, “Mike, if you had one employee that you wish you had 10 of, what are the defining characteristics of that employee?” And he started talking and we realized farm kids are awesome people to work for a heating and air company. People that are competitive, maybe they had basketball in high school, or they played some type of competitive sport because that also matches Mike’s values and Mike’s beliefs.

Mike’s very humble. You know, sometimes you got to get out of Mike what he’s doing. Okay. Because he doesn’t just brag on himself. And he’s a very, very humble guy. And somehow I remember getting out that he was doing this bases thing. “How many did we give up? How many did we gain? Who won the game at the end of the day?” I was like, that’s brilliant. That is so fricking fantastic. You know? And he started it when he grasped that concept of, “Yeah, I can manage my team like I manage my rec league or whatever. It just comes natural to me, you know?” That is what already works, so let’s go in that direction. Let’s use what Mike’s already strong at and let’s build upon it to build his culture.

Johnny Molson: Mike Whitmire, how has this changed how you hire?

Mike Whitmire: Well I used to just hire because it felt like I just needed a body. I’ve slowed down that process just a little bit. And I’m really digging, maybe not the tech questions, “Hey, can you fix a furnace? Do you know how it works? What do you know about air conditioning?” I’m looking more for guys with the background that I know that man, we can hit it right out of the gate just as friends. Because we have some commonality, we like to talk, and whether it’s baseball or hunting and fishing, whatever. So yeah, I’m looking for character. I’m looking for people that fit the things Mike and I worked on to develop, “Hey, this is the type of people…” Man, that competitive spirit, that hard work and those kinds of things. It relates down to even my office staff. You know, I’ve had the opportunity to bring in some new talent there. A lot of them are country kids just like myself. They have loves and ambitions, family people… I mean, it’s like you’re almost going to Thanksgiving dinner, sometimes. Walk past everybody’s desk, you ask about their son, Jimmy, or a stepchild, this, that, or the other. And you get to know everybody and it’s a much tighter group.

Johnny Molson: And character isn’t something that you can train, you can train the technical stuff. But character is inside of somebody.

Mike Whitmire: Yeah, yeah. You know I’m relying on the parents or the others in their family to have instilled some of those character traits in them. And you know what, maybe I should be thanking maybe not my team, but their parents, because they’ve done a heck of a job raising good kids. Yeah.

Johnny Molson: Mike Slover, which took the lead: did you need to fix the culture before the advertising happened? Or did they both happen at the same time? How do you balance that out?

Mike Slover: The advertising didn’t need a whole lot of fixing in my view. The problem was the turnover ratio inside and the culture. I researched Zappos many years ago and just fell in love with the the message that Tony Hsieh was talking about. If you can get the culture right, everything else falls into place. And when the culture’s right, it makes the advertising work so much better. And Mike was able to hire those people that fit the culture. They work better together. Is there still people that go? Yeah, but our goal is to have the lowest turnover per capita for an HVAC company in Pennsylvania. That’s what we’re striving for. We looked at the numbers the other day. I think last year we were in kind of some high double digits. Right now we are on pace to cut that in half. And now you’re not paying to train somebody. You’re keeping these guys. We need 10-year guys. We need a whole staff of installers, technicians, office folks that have been there for 10 years plus. And we’re going to do gangbusters. You can’t let off the gas. This culture thing is a lifelong endeavor. You can never forget about it. Because otherwise you’re going back and you’re going to backslide down the hill.

Mike Whitmire: You know, success is measured in a lot of ways. One way is that retention number or loss of employee. I mean, we’re probably going to be about half of what we lost over each of the last two years. You know, double digit employees, two years consecutive, that was a stinger. A big stinger.

Mike Slover: We were at 40… I’ve got it scratched down, but one year we were 40 some odd percent. This year we’re just a little scratch over 20. So one year we lost almost half of our employees. That’s a problem, and that’s being fixed. And we just started this again this year. It probably wasn’t until March or so that we really started to fan it. And I know Mike and I’s conversation, we call each other every week or every other week. And I know that helps. I went through my whole health problem and kind of dropped that a little bit. But we’re back at it now. It’s gotta be something that you don’t ever give up. I think if you’ve got something that people want to buy, which they do, everybody needs heating and air for the most part — it’s who you’re going to use. The second most important thing, besides having something people want to buy, is having something people want to buy from

Johnny Molson: It’s worth spending a good amount of time on the culture within your business, because that will then translate into how your customers relate and feel about the business. And we do business with the companies that we feel best about and think of first. If you have any comments or questions, leave them in the YouTube comments, or you can reach out to Mike Slover or me.

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